Facebook just turned ten years old. A lot has changed in that decade. We’ve grown accustomed to sharing details of our lives through a single platform that tracks our likes, dislikes, friendships, and interests, and follows us when we leave the site to browse the web. We’ve gotten used to using our Facebook login to sign up for other services. We’ve grown resigned (to the point of indifference) to the panopticon that corporations like Facebook have created by using our activity on the Internet as our window on the world and their big-data window into ours.

Facebook is in many ways an anti-model for libraries, but from this one action libraries can learn much. On May 24, 2007, Facebook became a platform: a set of resources — services, data, tools — that enable independent developers to create applications. Interesting possibilities open up if we think of libraries as platforms…open platforms. A library platform would be about developing knowledge and community, not primarily for developing software. Still, like an open software platform, it would: